It is also the same way they get the pears inside bottles of Clear Creek brandy. People think it is some weird technological trick. Instead they just tie the bottle on the tree and the pear grows inside it.
Now if they could just get the brandy to taste less like some sort of industrial waste contaminant...
In my experience, MBA programs teach some very dangerous things.
The bigest of these is that you do not have understand the process that you are managing.
If management is the process of making decisions about a project and allocating resources to complete that project, then you have to have some rational understanding of what is involved in that project. (Otherwise you can be replaced by a random number generator. Probably with better results.)
What happens with managers who do not have that requisite clue is that they make decisions based on "other criteria". (Things like "how good of an ad does the vendor have", "The product the airline magazine recommended", or "which one had the prettier marketing rep".)
Harvard MBAs are the worst of the lot. They are the ones who seem to have started the trend that clueless managers are a good thing.
And heaven forbid that you actually work for a company run by someone who taught in the MBA program! (*cough*NCD*cough*) It is guarenteed that they will drive your company into the ground.
Dilbert exists because this style of "management" has become the accepted norm.
Management has been used as a place to put all of those oxygen-robbing morons who had the fortune to be born to a good family, but not the brains to go into a trade that would really require actual thought. (Like criminal lawyer (redundant, I know), oilwell salesman, or brothel owner.)
And it seems the less you know about the business and what it does, the higher you will rise in the company.
Makes you wonder just how American businesses survive at all. (And judging by the dot-coms, we have our answer...)
Queso is very inaccurate. I have seen it give answers that can best be described as "wild-ass guesses".
You are better off using nmap for OS detection. At least it has been updated on a regular basis.
If you think the problem of people ripping out cables for the salvage value of the copper, just wait until this technology hits. Soon we will have space-bound pick-up trucks driving off with the solar panels on the International Space Station. A sorry mess we will be in then!
Most of the things I would want in such a place would get it shut down by the forces of Moral rectaltude.
Good quality alcohol. (Absinthe (not that Absente crap), Cognac (at least VSOP, if not XO), Single Malts no younger than 16 years, Canadian hard cide or tap, and good micro-brews of various sorts.)
Sections that are quiet. (Sound-proofed if possible.) Half the time I go out I can barely hear myself think, let alone the person across from me.)
Good live bands. (Groups like "Land of the Blind" that thrive on low crowd noise and lack of tobacco.)
Networked deathmatch games.
TVs that do not show sports. (Marx bros movies, Sci Fi, Ray Harryhousen movies, cartoons, Hong Kong action or fantasy films, or anything else I would feel like showing.)
Good looking females with an IQ.
Of course, any sort of unsupervised fun is deemed wrong and immoral by the constabulary and must be stomped out without mercy.
What is not mentioned is that these movies are BIG.
For example, the AEC movie on radioactive fallout is about 194megs for 8 minutes of film. At least they did not cop-out and put the films in an unwatchable postage-stamp sized picture.
Microsoft will dig through their huge library of patents and find something anything that can be used against the Linux community. They will get patents that will help them control protocols and then use Windows to make people dependant on it. They will do anything to remove any shread of interoperability that Linux has with Windows and they will use patents to do it.
My first concern when reading this article was "what happens to the data as the plastic ages?".
Does the data change if the plastic starts to darken or yellow? Could make for some interesting aat data recovery. ("Well, you just have to subtract one from every byte".)
I shop at a number of different computer stores in the Portland, OR area. Of those, almost all of them have carried Linux games in the past.
Few of them still do.
Sales of Linux games has been sparse. Part of this is that most people who use Linux do not tend to shop at those outlets for Linux stuff. Some of the titles just sit on the shelf for months.
The biggest problem though seems to be with how chain stores order. You think Mac games are considered an afterthought... These people do not seem to know what Linux is or what is wanted.
Stores that you would expect to be able to keep Linux programs in stock are falling behind. The biggest example of this is Fry's in Wilsonville. They used to have a large selection of Linux games and programs. Now the Linux/BSD shelf is half stocked with Windows ME! The only current versions of Linux are Redhat 7.0 and SuSE 7.0. Slackware and Mandrake are gone. There are about two different games. Nothing seems to getting reordered at the Portland store for Linux. (Though they do for their California stores.)
The attitude I see when dealing with these places is "The Linux Hype is over, so we don't carry it any more.".
I guess you just have to keep hammering on your local stores if you want to be able to find Linux *anything* in the future.
I have worked for a couple of places where the laid-off and fired "just vanish" and/or little or no notice is given.
When I worked doing database programming, amyone fired would just not be seen again. (This place was incredibly paranoid and for good reason. They were hypocritical bastards.) And you knew that if someone was one of the "disappeared" that you did not ask about them, or you might get the same fate.
One contract I worked on, I was told the system had crashed that morning before I got to work. I dialed in and found that the passwords had been changed. Guess what? Yep. Informed the moment I walked in the door. (I asked too many embarasing questions to the new PHMis director.)
Most places where the management is suffering from paranoia that the workers are out to get them seem to manage in this way. Those are the places that are stressful just walking in the door. (I can remember getting blamed for a system crash when I walked in the door. I had not worked there for months and they had no dial-in. Ironically, I knew who was doing it and told them repeatedly. They would not believe me because he wore a suit and played the kiss-up game. He was hacking in file pointers into the middle of kernel VM memory and crashing the machine.)
I learned a long time ago that if an employer does those kinds of things when you leave, get out on your timetable and quick. Companies that do that to employees as they leave are also willing to screw with you for other petty reasons on a whim. (To understand the reasons behind this, find a good book on primate behaviour.)
It does melt when you put something WARM over it. (Like a house or an earthmover.) Building on permafrost is a *BAD* idea. Park a big earthmover that has been running all day and see how long it takes to sink like a stone.
The top layer of permafrost does melt in the summer. (I have heard the whole area refered to as "permafrost", so i tend to use that usage.) I know. I have walked on it. (The top layer is covered by a thin and dense layer of vegitation. Kind of like walking on a carpet covering jello.)
My point was that the heat and weight of putting a rail system on that kind of ground is VERY expensive. You can't just build on top of it. They have tried that before in Alaska and it does not work. Either the road suffers from frost heaves and/or it buckles and sinks. The only way they can build on it in any stable fashion is to dig to bedrock and fill. They had to do it for the pipe, they do it for homes in Ancorage (where my parents live), and they have to do it for any other place where there is permafrost and they want to build.
I don't ever see this getting off the ground (or under it).
I used to live in Alaska. I moved there just before the pipeline went in. I remember what *that* took. This is a much bigger project with some bigger obsticles.
First - They are going to have to deal with the environmentalists. That alone is going to be a big task. When the pipeline was built, the various pro-environment groups were not nearly as strong as today. Getting them to even remotely buy-off on this is going to be next to impossible, if not totally impossible.
Second- They are going to have to figure out a way to make this thing work in tempitures that range from 60 below zero f to +90f in the summer. The climate is not hospitable to things that have moving parts or that can get buried.
Third - Much of the land is covered in permafrost. In order to build anything on it that will last, you have to dig to bedrock and fill with some other material. (Permafrost melts into a mud/jello-like substance in the summer. Outside Fairbanks you can see roofs of sunken houses that were built on it by foolish settlers.)
Fourth - There is absolutly NO economic reason to build the thing in the first place. Who is going to use it? The population density in Alaska and Siberia is very close to empty. There are not many people there. For the amount of track you would have to lay for so few people, what is the point?
Fifth - Good luck trying to get the governments of the US, Russia and Canada to agree on any of the details. I expect the wrangling by them, as well as the unions and other people who would want a peice of this to eat up 60 billion just amongst themselves. And that is before any track is laid.
Just because you can do a thing, does not mean you should.
I have already contacted them. They are investigating to see if the program is covered by the patent and if it is actually prior art. It looks like it may be, but it is hard to say without a patent lawyer looking it over first.
I don't know the date of their "invention", but there was a web site I worked on MANY years ago. (1996 or so) that used thumbnails in just this manner. The site no longer exists, but the company I wrote it for still does.
Incredibly obvious idea. Anyone who has used an image viewing program in the last 10 years could think of a web version.
.perv - Most of the net falls under this one...
.orgy - For those special clustering solutions
.dot - For those who still have ham radio licences.
.dash - For the rest of the Morse Code freaks
.netnazi - For all those people who want to act like the French government.
.post - So I can get "first.post".
This reminds me of the way poluters are treated in the States. "Pay this "fee" and we will let you violate this law."
Of course, the money will never go to the people supposedly harmed by the action they are collecting the money for. It will just go into the government's coffers and never be seen again.
What bothers me the most is that they seem to think that the general polulace is too stupid to figure this out. (Then again, they may be right...)
You can patent it unless the publication of the idea occured over one year before the filing of the patent. (This alone should have invalidated the RSA patent.)
Over my years on the net, I have seen different forms of flaming.
When I was involved in the BBS community, there was flaming for the sake of flaming. Entire areas of the board devoted to insulting and attacking anyone within sight for no particular reason whatsoever. Kind of like the verbal parlor games of the French court played out in text, they were attack for the sake of attack with no real mallice meant. Sort of a creative outlet for those unable to come up with something useful to say or have a real position to hold.
Then there is flaming when dealing with an intelectual argument. Ad hominem attacks are usually not useful in debate. It is normally the sign that you lack the ability to backup your point in any other way. The only exception I have seen to this is dealing with the incredibly thick. Sometimes you have to vent a bit when dealing with people who are so dogmatic and rigid that they cannot deal with facts or evidence that contradict their tiny world-view in any manner whatsoever. (Like Creationists on talk.origins.)
There is also another way flaming is used. That is to try and piss off the opponent. In a net argument, there are three people involved, you, the person you are arguing against, and the audience. The first one of the primary two to lose their temper is usually the one who loses in the eyes of the audience. Net argument can be construed as a form of weird intelectual street theatre in this case. The first person to start blowing their lines is the one who usually loses.
Flaming does have its place, within reason. Unfortunatly, the net has also attraced some who are attempting to turn it into a "safe space" for them and their ideas. The "safe space" movement are composed of people who don't want their ideas to be challenged. They don't want an intelectual discussion where they might be proven wrong or told that they are deluding themselves. They see flaming as a threat because they see it as yet another attack on them. And since flaming is more heat than light, it makes a good scapegoat. They can then say "This is why we need more safe places on the web". To the uninitiated, it gives yet another excuse to hand over control to the control freaks.
My experiences trying to get DSL have been pretty trying.
I tried to get DSL through my local telco. (US West.) I am the proper distance, but US West claims that there is "something wrong with the line". When asked what the problem is, they cannot give me an answer.
I try going through Covad and Northpoint. I get the answer that there is "electronics on the line". My only option given is to order IDSL which is basically an always on ISDN connection. (At ISDN speeds, which is much less than DSL.)
It turns out that in order to save money in my neighborhood, US West has used hardware compression to make more voice lines fit on the trunk. Everyone in my neighborhood is screwed when it comes to DSL.
Furthermore, the regulations for phone lines are so ancient in Oregon that you are pretty much SOL getting anything beyond a dial tone. And data? Don't make me laugh! They don't guarantee ANY sort of quality for data. And to make matters worse, they have gotten DSL exempted from the rules covering phone lines all together.
Basically you are at their mercy if you want DSL.
I am exploring other options to get high speed data into my house. So far, I have had few options and those become more vapornet as time goes on.
"The more I deal with the phone company, the more I understand terrorism."
Slashdot Mirror
I knew you could!
/., I would think there would be more redundancy on the hardware level as well...
This being
It is also the same way they get the pears inside bottles of Clear Creek brandy. People think it is some weird technological trick. Instead they just tie the bottle on the tree and the pear grows inside it.
Now if they could just get the brandy to taste less like some sort of industrial waste contaminant...
In my experience, MBA programs teach some very dangerous things.
The bigest of these is that you do not have understand the process that you are managing.
If management is the process of making decisions about a project and allocating resources to complete that project, then you have to have some rational understanding of what is involved in that project. (Otherwise you can be replaced by a random number generator. Probably with better results.)
What happens with managers who do not have that requisite clue is that they make decisions based on "other criteria". (Things like "how good of an ad does the vendor have", "The product the airline magazine recommended", or "which one had the prettier marketing rep".)
Harvard MBAs are the worst of the lot. They are the ones who seem to have started the trend that clueless managers are a good thing.
And heaven forbid that you actually work for a company run by someone who taught in the MBA program! (*cough*NCD*cough*) It is guarenteed that they will drive your company into the ground.
Dilbert exists because this style of "management" has become the accepted norm.
Management has been used as a place to put all of those oxygen-robbing morons who had the fortune to be born to a good family, but not the brains to go into a trade that would really require actual thought. (Like criminal lawyer (redundant, I know), oilwell salesman, or brothel owner.)
And it seems the less you know about the business and what it does, the higher you will rise in the company.
Makes you wonder just how American businesses survive at all. (And judging by the dot-coms, we have our answer...)
Maybe they are concerned about their programmers getting assassinated by anti-game terrorists.
Death to the demon [YOUR NAME HERE]!
Queso is very inaccurate. I have seen it give answers that can best be described as "wild-ass guesses". You are better off using nmap for OS detection. At least it has been updated on a regular basis.
It has been replaced by:
"Make random acts of beauty and senseless violence."
Kind of a "make Love AND War".
If you think the problem of people ripping out cables for the salvage value of the copper, just wait until this technology hits. Soon we will have space-bound pick-up trucks driving off with the solar panels on the International Space Station. A sorry mess we will be in then!
Chip Saltzenberg was trying to have Perl 6.0 be in C++.
Think of the disaster that would have been.
"What do you mean, Perl will no longer install on my Solaris box? I don't have space for C++ as well as C. ARGH!"
C++ is still not protable across platforms in any sort of reasonable sense. It would have been nice if it was.
Luckly Chip got talked out of it. (Probably with a big stick.)
Most of the things I would want in such a place would get it shut down by the forces of Moral rectaltude.
Good quality alcohol. (Absinthe (not that Absente crap), Cognac (at least VSOP, if not XO), Single Malts no younger than 16 years, Canadian hard cide or tap, and good micro-brews of various sorts.)
Sections that are quiet. (Sound-proofed if possible.) Half the time I go out I can barely hear myself think, let alone the person across from me.)
Good live bands. (Groups like "Land of the Blind" that thrive on low crowd noise and lack of tobacco.)
Networked deathmatch games.
TVs that do not show sports. (Marx bros movies, Sci Fi, Ray Harryhousen movies, cartoons, Hong Kong action or fantasy films, or anything else I would feel like showing.)
Good looking females with an IQ.
Of course, any sort of unsupervised fun is deemed wrong and immoral by the constabulary and must be stomped out without mercy.
"So shall it be, this is the land of the free..."
What is not mentioned is that these movies are BIG.
For example, the AEC movie on radioactive fallout is about 194megs for 8 minutes of film. At least they did not cop-out and put the films in an unwatchable postage-stamp sized picture.
Microsoft will dig through their huge library of patents and find something anything that can be used against the Linux community. They will get patents that will help them control protocols and then use Windows to make people dependant on it. They will do anything to remove any shread of interoperability that Linux has with Windows and they will use patents to do it.
My first concern when reading this article was "what happens to the data as the plastic ages?".
Does the data change if the plastic starts to darken or yellow? Could make for some interesting aat data recovery. ("Well, you just have to subtract one from every byte".)
I shop at a number of different computer stores in the Portland, OR area. Of those, almost all of them have carried Linux games in the past.
Few of them still do.
Sales of Linux games has been sparse. Part of this is that most people who use Linux do not tend to shop at those outlets for Linux stuff. Some of the titles just sit on the shelf for months.
The biggest problem though seems to be with how chain stores order. You think Mac games are considered an afterthought... These people do not seem to know what Linux is or what is wanted.
Stores that you would expect to be able to keep Linux programs in stock are falling behind. The biggest example of this is Fry's in Wilsonville. They used to have a large selection of Linux games and programs. Now the Linux/BSD shelf is half stocked with Windows ME! The only current versions of Linux are Redhat 7.0 and SuSE 7.0. Slackware and Mandrake are gone. There are about two different games. Nothing seems to getting reordered at the Portland store for Linux. (Though they do for their California stores.)
The attitude I see when dealing with these places is "The Linux Hype is over, so we don't carry it any more.".
I guess you just have to keep hammering on your local stores if you want to be able to find Linux *anything* in the future.
I have worked for a couple of places where the laid-off and fired "just vanish" and/or little or no notice is given.
When I worked doing database programming, amyone fired would just not be seen again. (This place was incredibly paranoid and for good reason. They were hypocritical bastards.) And you knew that if someone was one of the "disappeared" that you did not ask about them, or you might get the same fate.
One contract I worked on, I was told the system had crashed that morning before I got to work. I dialed in and found that the passwords had been changed. Guess what? Yep. Informed the moment I walked in the door. (I asked too many embarasing questions to the new PHMis director.)
Most places where the management is suffering from paranoia that the workers are out to get them seem to manage in this way. Those are the places that are stressful just walking in the door. (I can remember getting blamed for a system crash when I walked in the door. I had not worked there for months and they had no dial-in. Ironically, I knew who was doing it and told them repeatedly. They would not believe me because he wore a suit and played the kiss-up game. He was hacking in file pointers into the middle of kernel VM memory and crashing the machine.)
I learned a long time ago that if an employer does those kinds of things when you leave, get out on your timetable and quick. Companies that do that to employees as they leave are also willing to screw with you for other petty reasons on a whim. (To understand the reasons behind this, find a good book on primate behaviour.)
It does melt when you put something WARM over it. (Like a house or an earthmover.) Building on permafrost is a *BAD* idea. Park a big earthmover that has been running all day and see how long it takes to sink like a stone.
The top layer of permafrost does melt in the summer. (I have heard the whole area refered to as "permafrost", so i tend to use that usage.) I know. I have walked on it. (The top layer is covered by a thin and dense layer of vegitation. Kind of like walking on a carpet covering jello.)
My point was that the heat and weight of putting a rail system on that kind of ground is VERY expensive. You can't just build on top of it. They have tried that before in Alaska and it does not work. Either the road suffers from frost heaves and/or it buckles and sinks. The only way they can build on it in any stable fashion is to dig to bedrock and fill. They had to do it for the pipe, they do it for homes in Ancorage (where my parents live), and they have to do it for any other place where there is permafrost and they want to build.
No real choice there.
I don't ever see this getting off the ground (or under it).
I used to live in Alaska. I moved there just before the pipeline went in. I remember what *that* took. This is a much bigger project with some bigger obsticles.
First - They are going to have to deal with the environmentalists. That alone is going to be a big task. When the pipeline was built, the various pro-environment groups were not nearly as strong as today. Getting them to even remotely buy-off on this is going to be next to impossible, if not totally impossible.
Second- They are going to have to figure out a way to make this thing work in tempitures that range from 60 below zero f to +90f in the summer. The climate is not hospitable to things that have moving parts or that can get buried.
Third - Much of the land is covered in permafrost. In order to build anything on it that will last, you have to dig to bedrock and fill with some other material. (Permafrost melts into a mud/jello-like substance in the summer. Outside Fairbanks you can see roofs of sunken houses that were built on it by foolish settlers.)
Fourth - There is absolutly NO economic reason to build the thing in the first place. Who is going to use it? The population density in Alaska and Siberia is very close to empty. There are not many people there. For the amount of track you would have to lay for so few people, what is the point?
Fifth - Good luck trying to get the governments of the US, Russia and Canada to agree on any of the details. I expect the wrangling by them, as well as the unions and other people who would want a peice of this to eat up 60 billion just amongst themselves. And that is before any track is laid.
Just because you can do a thing, does not mean you should.
I have already contacted them. They are investigating to see if the program is covered by the patent and if it is actually prior art. It looks like it may be, but it is hard to say without a patent lawyer looking it over first.
I don't know the date of their "invention", but there was a web site I worked on MANY years ago. (1996 or so) that used thumbnails in just this manner. The site no longer exists, but the company I wrote it for still does. Incredibly obvious idea. Anyone who has used an image viewing program in the last 10 years could think of a web version.
TLDs like:
.perv - Most of the net falls under this one...
.orgy - For those special clustering solutions
.dot - For those who still have ham radio licences.
.dash - For the rest of the Morse Code freaks
.netnazi - For all those people who want to act like the French government.
.post - So I can get "first.post".
This reminds me of the way poluters are treated in the States. "Pay this "fee" and we will let you violate this law."
Of course, the money will never go to the people supposedly harmed by the action they are collecting the money for. It will just go into the government's coffers and never be seen again.
What bothers me the most is that they seem to think that the general polulace is too stupid to figure this out. (Then again, they may be right...)
the cancelation of Dr. WHO. It was part of a secret deal to resolve a trademark dispute with the World Health Organization.
unwind a Keren Carpenter ruler? It is the same problem until the tape stretches thin and becomes brittle.
You can patent it unless the publication of the idea occured over one year before the filing of the patent. (This alone should have invalidated the RSA patent.)
Over my years on the net, I have seen different forms of flaming.
When I was involved in the BBS community, there was flaming for the sake of flaming. Entire areas of the board devoted to insulting and attacking anyone within sight for no particular reason whatsoever. Kind of like the verbal parlor games of the French court played out in text, they were attack for the sake of attack with no real mallice meant. Sort of a creative outlet for those unable to come up with something useful to say or have a real position to hold.
Then there is flaming when dealing with an intelectual argument. Ad hominem attacks are usually not useful in debate. It is normally the sign that you lack the ability to backup your point in any other way. The only exception I have seen to this is dealing with the incredibly thick. Sometimes you have to vent a bit when dealing with people who are so dogmatic and rigid that they cannot deal with facts or evidence that contradict their tiny world-view in any manner whatsoever. (Like Creationists on talk.origins.)
There is also another way flaming is used. That is to try and piss off the opponent. In a net argument, there are three people involved, you, the person you are arguing against, and the audience. The first one of the primary two to lose their temper is usually the one who loses in the eyes of the audience. Net argument can be construed as a form of weird intelectual street theatre in this case. The first person to start blowing their lines is the one who usually loses.
Flaming does have its place, within reason. Unfortunatly, the net has also attraced some who are attempting to turn it into a "safe space" for them and their ideas. The "safe space" movement are composed of people who don't want their ideas to be challenged. They don't want an intelectual discussion where they might be proven wrong or told that they are deluding themselves. They see flaming as a threat because they see it as yet another attack on them. And since flaming is more heat than light, it makes a good scapegoat. They can then say "This is why we need more safe places on the web". To the uninitiated, it gives yet another excuse to hand over control to the control freaks.
My experiences trying to get DSL have been pretty trying.
I tried to get DSL through my local telco. (US West.) I am the proper distance, but US West claims that there is "something wrong with the line". When asked what the problem is, they cannot give me an answer.
I try going through Covad and Northpoint. I get the answer that there is "electronics on the line". My only option given is to order IDSL which is basically an always on ISDN connection. (At ISDN speeds, which is much less than DSL.)
It turns out that in order to save money in my neighborhood, US West has used hardware compression to make more voice lines fit on the trunk. Everyone in my neighborhood is screwed when it comes to DSL.
Furthermore, the regulations for phone lines are so ancient in Oregon that you are pretty much SOL getting anything beyond a dial tone. And data? Don't make me laugh! They don't guarantee ANY sort of quality for data. And to make matters worse, they have gotten DSL exempted from the rules covering phone lines all together.
Basically you are at their mercy if you want DSL.
I am exploring other options to get high speed data into my house. So far, I have had few options and those become more vapornet as time goes on.
"The more I deal with the phone company, the more I understand terrorism."